Best practices for Enterprise Vault File System Archiving (FSA) support for Storage Replica

Description

Storage Replica is Windows Server technology that enables replication of volumes between servers or clusters for disaster recovery. It also enables you to create stretch failover clusters that span two sites, with all nodes staying in sync. Its supports synchronous and asynchronous replication. 
For an overview of Windows Server Storage Replica, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-replica/storage-replica-overview 

Best practices for Enterprise Vault File System Archiving (FSA) support for Storage Replica:

• Stretch Cluster Replication:

  1. Use Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of "File Server Role in Cluster" while adding the File server target in Enterprise Vault (as shown in the image below).
  2. Make sure to restart the Enterprise Vault Placeholder service on the latest active node after every replication switch.

• Server-to-Server Replication:

  1. On the DNS server, create a DNS alias pointing to the source file server.
  2. After successful replication, make sure that the data to be added under the FSA target is shared on the source as well on the destination server before adding the file server target using its DNS alias FQDN. The share should be accessible at the same path after every switching replication, for example, “\\<DNS Alias>\<Share>”
  3. Use Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of DNS alias for source file server while adding file server target in Enterprise Vault.
     
  4. While adding the FSA target, the FSA agent will get installed on the source file server, however, you will need to manually install the FSA agent on the destination file server.
  5. Since the file server is added as a target using FQDN of its alias, you need to make sure to update the alias to point to the active file server after every replication switch. This will make sure that the shares are always accessible through the alias name. Due to a change in the alias, please make sure to clear the DNS cache.
  6. Make sure to restart the Enterprise Vault Placeholder service on the latest active file server after every replication switch.

• Cluster-to-Cluster Replication:

  1. Cluster to cluster storage replication configuration of Storage Replica is not supported by Veritas Enterprise Vault because this configuration requires Scale-Out File Server, which is not supported by Enterprise Vault.